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Pascal
About the Language Origins The Pascal language was originally designed in 1971 by Niklaus Wirth, professor at the Polytechnic of Zurich, Switzerland. Pascal was designed as a simplified version for educational purposes of the language Algol, which dates from 1960. When Pascal was designed, many programming languages existed, but few were in widespread use: FORTRAN, C, Assembler, COBOL. The key idea of the new language was order, managed through a strong concept of data type, and requiring declarations and structured program controls. The language was also designed to be a teaching tool for students of programming classes. Turbo Pascal Borland's world-famous Pascal compiler, called Turbo Pascal, was introduced in 1983, implementing "Pascal User Manual and Report" by Jensen and Wirth. The Turbo Pascal compiler has been one of the best-selling series of compilers of all time, and made the language particularly popular on the PC platform, thanks to its balance of simplicity and power. Turbo Pascal introduced an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) where you could edit the code (in a WordStar compatible editor), run the compiler, see the errors, and jump back to the lines containing those errors. It sounds trivial now, but previously you had to quit the editor, return to DOS; run the command-line compiler, write down the error lines, open the editor and jump there. Moreover Borland sold Turbo Pascal for 49 dollars, where Microsoft's Pascal compiler was sold for a few hundred. Turbo Pascal's many years of success contributed to Microsoft's eventual cancellation of its Pascal compiler product. Delphi's Pascal After 9 versions of Turbo and Borland Pascal compilers, which gradually extended the language, Borland released Delphi in 1995, turning Pascal into a visual programming language (looking and operating not entirely unlike Microsoft Visual BASIC 3 - except it was a native compiled OO Language). Delphi's flavor of Object Pascal extends the Pascal language in a number of ways, including many object-oriented extensions which are different from other flavors of Object Pascal, including those in the Borland Pascal with Objects compiler. In fact if you look at the way Delphi/Kylix implements objects it is actually better than C++/Java in a lot of ways for example:- property : [read |] [write |]; real example:- property EndDate: TDateTime read GetEndDate write SetEndDate; The programmer can then manipulate "EndDate" as if it were a date/time variable oblivious to the fact that there are Get/Set methods behind the scenes. Java relies on convention to achieve this... External Links Popular Pascal Compilers * Borland's Delphi is the world's standard RAD development studio in the industry. * Borland's Kylix is the Linux alternative to Delphi. Object Pascal Game Programming Resources * PGD is a central repository of all things related to developing games using the Pascal language. Sections for Delphi, Kylix and FreePascal * Turbo is great resource for Borland related game development Components of Delphi for Programming 2D/3D Aplications * DelphiX/unDelphiX - Components that help out when you want to start programming games. * GLScene (OpenGL components) * Torry's Delphi Pages - Check out Torry's massive vault of Delphi components, including sections for graphics and multimedia. * Clootie's graphics pages (Programing Delphi with DirectX, library and demos) * Delphi 3D is Tom Nuyden's excellent advanced OpenGL site * DelphiGL is Sascha Willem's excellent OpenGL site Official Pascal Language Standards * List of official standard versions of the Pascal language. Category:Programming_languages